Was the United States founded as a Christian nation?

Transcription

1 CHRISTIAN NATION Was the United States founded as a Christian nation? Viewpoint: Yes. The Founding Fathers saw an intrinsic relationship between Christian values and morality and believed a virtuous citizenry was essential to the survival of the republic. Viewpoint: No. The Founding Fathers created a secular federal charter intended to protect the religious pluralism of American citizens by maintaining a separation of church and state. The modern United States is beset with many pernicious problems: rampant crime, violence, divorce, drug abuse, and teen pregnancies, among many others. In explaining these persistent problems, some Christian Americans point to an alleged decline in morality and "traditional values." If the United States is to be saved, they argue, Americans must return to their Christian heritage and embrace the God of the Bible and its underlying system of morals. To continue to reject the Bible as the foundation upon which the nation rests is to invite further harm to a free and just society. Supporting their jeremiad with real action, these Christians are involved in a determined effort to convince the government to use its awesome power to promote their version of Christianity (nearly always of the Protestant variety) to the public. Critical to their cause is the argument that the United States was founded as a Christian nation. 60 Whether the United States was founded as a Christian nation is currently one of the most hotly debated issues among scholars and nonacademics alike. Central to this debate is the "establishment clause" of the First Amendment to the Constitution, which states that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." Religious activists argue that the establishment clause does not prohibit individuals from applying religious precepts to the legislative and judicial agenda of state governments. Instead, they argue, the First Amendment was designed to stop Congress from asserting a preference for one religious denomination over others. They further point out that the Founding Fathers, in creating the U.S. Constitution, were deeply concerned with public virtue and believed that there was an intrinsic connection between morality and good government. A virtuous citizenry, they believed, was crucial to the success of the new republic. Unless Americans were willing to subordinate their own private interests for the common good and behave in a moral, benevolent, and public-spirited manner, society would become corrupt, and government would collapse. The Founders, all deeply religious men raised under a Protestant/ Puritan ethic, defined virtue in terms of Judeo-Christian values and maintained that without the constant nourishing of religion, personal virtue would perish. Thus, following biblical teachings was considered essential to the survival of both morality and republican government. This attitude is expressed in the first state constitutions, which required a Christian oath as a condition for public officeholding, and in early state and federal courts, which declared that biblical law was part of American common law.

2 Acknowledging that the Constitution is virtually silent on religious issues, proponents of the Christian-nation argument explain that the Framers of the Constitution wanted to protect the states from federal intrusion on religious matters. On the opposing side of this debate are those who argue that the Founders intended religion to be independent of government in order to ensure freedom of belief and conscience. This objective explains why the U.S. Constitution makes no reference to God and prohibits religious tests for holding federal office. The First Amendment, additionally, reflects the Framers' intention of creating a government that respects and protects the religious pluralism of American citizens, not one that promotes a particular religion. They also thought it best for the Constitution to remain neutral on the position of religion so as not to infringe on the various state laws respecting religion. In short, the Constitution is a secular document that creates a secular federal government. Nor did the Founding Fathers constitutionalize Christianity in the national charter by officially declaring the United States a Christian nation. The Founders' vision of religious liberty, as illustrated in the Constitution and the First Amendment, was the freedom for religious belief to be independent of government interference. This debate raises several interesting questions concerning Christianity and its relationship to the genesis and future direction of the nation. If the Founders believed that Christian values served as the essential foundation of virtue and morality, why did they create a federal charter that allowed for the enslavement of millions of people and that denied basic civil and political rights to women? Indeed, Americans of the Founding generation often used the Bible to justify the denial of basic natural rights to women and minorities. What does this policy reveal about the Framers' attitudes toward Judeo-Christian ethics and the nation's alleged Christian heritage? Viewpoint: Yes. The Founding Fathers saw an intrinsic relationship between Christian values and morality and believed a virtuous citizenry was essential to the survival of the republic. Whether the Founders intended to create a Christian nation is overlaid with a host of historical and interpretive issues. Some historians repeatedly assert that the Founders intended to create a secular state, but they do not give a definition of the term. Sometimes the word secular is used to denote the concept of a government with limited powers. In most instances, however, the context makes clear that secular is not simply in contrast to the terms religious or Christian. Instead, it denotes that the Founders opted not to accommodate or encourage religion in the nation. To state that since the Founders did not insert a clause into the Constitution declaring the United States to be a Christian nation, they therefore intended to create a secular one is a logical fallacy. It is akin to saying the United States is not an English-speaking nation because that fact is not specified in the Constitution. Such a position equates the Constitution as being one and the same as the nation, and it divorces the Constitution from the historical context in which it was created. A few scholars have ignored the historical complexities that presented themselves to the Founders, therefore misreading the limited choices that they could exercise about religion and its relationship to the new frame of government, which turned out to be one with limited powers. It only had limited powers delegated to it by the states. Regulating religion and interfering with public expression of faith were specifically denied the new federal government. These limitations on the federal government were stated in both the First and Tenth Amendments in the Bill of Rights (1791). In making the case that the Founders intended to create a Christian nation, one must first give attention to what constitutes the nation. Johann Gottfried Herder, nineteenth-century German philosopher of history, posited that a nation is the Volk, an identifiable people who share a common history, traditions, and values. One must not narrowly identify the nation with a frame of government, set of laws, or amendments. Laws and constitutions often change and reflect the will of nations. The Constitution, then, should not be defined as being one and the same as the United States. The American nation emerged from the thirteen British colonies that banded together and created the Continental Congress that in 1776 declared the colonies to be free and independent states. Congress in 1781 ratified the first frame of government, the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union. The Founders HISTORY IN DISPUTE, VOLUME 12: THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 61

3 MAN & HIS GOD On 1 January 1802 President Thomas Jetterson panned the following letter to the Danbury Baptist Association in Connecticut. Gentlemen The affectionate sentiments of esteem and approbation which you are so good as to express towards me, on behalf of the Danbury Baptist association, give me the highest satisfaction. My duties dictate a faithfui and zealous pursuit of the interests of my constituents, & in proportion as they are persuaded of my fidelity to those duties, the discharge of them becomes more and more pleasing. Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." thus building a wall of separation between Church & State. Adhering to this expression of the supreme will of the nation in behalf of the rights of conscience, t shall see with sincere satisfaction the progress of those sentiments which tend to restore to man all his natural rights, convinced he has no natural right in opposition to his social duties. I reciprocate your kind prayers for the protection & blessing of the common father and creator of man, and tender you for yourselves & your religious association, assurances of my high respect & esteem. Source: "Jefferson's Letter to the Danbury Baptists." 1C Information Bulletin {June 1998) < toc.gov/lo&kibisso&'fianpre.htmb. of this political Union recognized the work of Providence with these words: "It hath pleased the Great Governor of the World to incline the hearts of the legislatures we respectively represent in Congress, to approve of, and to authorize us to ratify the said articles of confederation." Ratification took place not in year one of a new secular order but "in the year of our Lord one Thousand and seven Hundred and Seventy- eight." Both the sovereignty of God and the Christian calendar are recognized in the closing paragraph. Americans by common definition were a Christian people. Their political union launched a Christian nation into state building. To be sure, the initial political union was a weak frame of government that was restructured in 1787 to "create a more perfect Union." The American Christian nation as nation-state, at least in its embryonic form, was in place in This formation occurred before the Constitution was contemplated. President Abraham Lincoln in his first inaugural address (4 March 1861) declared that the Union came into being before the Constitution. Historian Edward Frank Humphrey, in discussing nationalism and religion in America from 1774 to 1789, wrote: "The American conception allows for national characteristics that are independent of the state. So we are a Christian nation even though Christianity is not a feature of the American state." To clarify the assertion that America was a Christian nation requires that one understand the nature of church-state relation in historical context. During the colonial period virtually all denominations of the Christian Church were represented in America. Some states had an established church; others granted partial toleration. Baptists and Quakers, who were most persecuted, pushed for full religious liberty both during and after the War of Independence ( ). The reality was that churches in these colonies gave immense support in the contest with Britain. Independent states in contemplating political union insisted on retaining authority over religion. Historian Philip Schaff explains: "The framers of the Constitution, therefore, had no right and no intention to interfere with the religion of the citizens of any State, or to discriminate between denominations; their only just and wise course was to leave the subject of religion with the several States, to put all churches on an equal footing before the national law, and to secure to them equal protection. Liberty of all is the best guarantee for the liberty of each." This situation placed the states in the driver's seat with respect to what powers would and would not be exercised by the new federal government. Since the Founders were supportive of religion as practiced in the states, silence on this subject in the Constitution cannot be interpreted as evidence for their wanting a secular nation. Schaff notes: "The Constitution did not create a nation, nor its religion and institutions. It found them already existing, and was framed for the purpose of protecting them under a republican form of government, in a rule of the people, by the people, and for the people." The outcome of the Constitutional Convention cannot be described as leading to a secular nation; it led to a Constitution that created a federal government with limited, delegated powers. It preserved the Christian 62 HISTORY IN DISPUTE, VOLUME 12: THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

4 nation by virtue of the continuity of existence of the thirteen original states that retained all reserved powers, that is, those not delegated to the federal government. These powers included jurisdiction over religion, education, health, and welfare. Delegates to the Philadelphia convention were prepared to do whatever was necessary to craft a constitution that would pass muster in state conventions. As things stood in the later colonial period, and perhaps most important as a result of the Great Awakening, a common understanding of the essentials of Christianity permeated the colonies. It led to both toleration across denomination lines, and as is true for Baptists and Quakers, the insistence that there should be total religious liberty. This latter view as adopted by the Founders forbids religious tests for officeholding. The motive for this policy was not hostility toward Christianity but recognition of equal standing of all denominations, which should not be confused with secularization of the nation. Religious liberty was constitutionalized with the adoption of the First Amendment, the first clause of which reads: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." Since the states retained all jurisdiction over religion and Congress was forbidden from interfering with its free exercise, one must ask: What did "free exercise" of religion look like in the early republic and for most of U.S. history? George Washington, chairman of the Constitutional Convention and first president of the new nation, was intimately familiar with all the debates and had a clear understanding of the meaning and nuances of every phrase in the Constitution. Washington was mindful of the precedents he was setting and took special pains that the Constitution and the laws of the United States were faithfully executed. On 30 April 1789 at Federal Hall, New York, he took the oath of office with his hands on an open Bible. He repeated the prescribed oath as specified in the Constitution and added: "So help me God." This addition was an act of free exercise of religion. There is not a shred of evidence that he believed the new federal government should be divorced from the Christian faith he embraced. Washington launched the new ship of state with an inaugural address as his first official act by saying: "... it would be peculiarly improper to omit, in this first official act, my fervent supplication to that Almighty Being who rules over the universe, who presides in the councils of nations and whose providential aids can supply every human defect." His further acknowledgment of God's "benediction" on the nation and working of "providential agency" in the affairs of state make it clear that he perceived no conflict between public expression of his Christian faith and carrying out the official duties of government. That the Founders in drawing up the Constitution launched a secular state with a view to proscribing or limiting expression of Christian faith in the public square is clearly false. Washington, in fact, reflected the spirit of the soonto-be-passed First Amendment. He called on the nation to recognize and thank God for the blessings of a new government by issuing a "National Day of Thanksgiving Proclamation" on 3 October What one learns about the new constitutional order from Washington and other Presidents in the early republic is that the federal government was not divorced from the streams of spiritual life that flowed through the entire nation and impacted all of its institutions. James Madison, acknowledged "Father of the Constitution" and fourth U.S. president, kept journals of the Philadelphia Convention that are the best record of the proceedings and debates. Madison was the chief contributor to The Federalist, a series of editorials arguing for adoption of the Constitution. He expressed the need for nurturing Christian character: "We have staked the whole future of American civilization, not upon the power of government, far from it. We have staked the future of all of our political institutions upon the capacity of mankind for self-government; upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to control ourselves, to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God." These words are not those of a man who wanted to secularize the nation. John Adams, second President of the United States, served as Massachusetts delegate to the Continental Congress and delegate to that state's constitutional convention. He was also the first U.S. ambassador to Great Britain. Adams echoed Madison when he asserted: "We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cord of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." Adams wanted to see Christian faith, morals, and values penetrate and shape the culture. The Founders wanted to retain the Christian nation that was already in place. They saw HISTORY IN DISPUTE, VOLUME 12: THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 63

5 fit to create a limited, not secular, federal government that had no jurisdiction over matters of religion and was barred from creating a state church, which was done to preserve religious liberty and encourage free exercise of religion. States had jurisdiction over the religion, education, health, and welfare of the people. The federal bar against establishment of a state church did not apply to the states; in fact, New England states for some decades retained their state churches. In this arrangement the federal government generally encouraged Christian religion inasmuch as English common law, which the United States absorbed, was based on Christianity. The federal government supported such practices as heterosexual marriage, banning of sodomy, posting of the Ten Commandments, public prayer and reading of the Bible, observance of Sunday as a day of rest and religious activities, use of chaplains for Congress and the military, and of course, the adoption of the Christian calendar that reckoned time using anno Domini ("in the year of our Lord"). When Mormons wanted to practice plural marriage, Congress prohibited it in The reason the Constitution was favorable toward Christianity from the beginning is, perhaps, most succinctly explained by U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. In Zomch v. Clausen (1952), a case concerning the right of New York City schoolchildren to leave school for one hour a week for religious instruction, Douglas said that Americans "are a religious people and our institutions presuppose a Supreme Being." For most of U.S. history up to World War II ( ), the federal government respected the constitutional jurisdiction of the states over religion and education, including allowing moral and spiritual guidance in public schools. Educational practices in many states included prayer and Bible reading, as well as the posting of the Ten Commandments. Then in Everson v. Board of Education (1947) the Supreme Court changed course. It interpreted the First Amendment so as to say that it created a wall of separation between church and state. In the wake of this strict separationist interpretation, the Court in the 1960s moved to strike down religious exercises in public education and in the public square. This mid-twentieth-century shift to constitutionalize secularization was a sharp departure from the past and was diametrically opposite to the intent and spirit of the Founders, who wisely crafted the Constitution to preserve the United States as a Christian nation. -DIETRICH BUSS, BIOLA UNIVERSITY Viewpoint: No. The Founding Fathers created a secular federal charter intended to protect the religious pluralism of American citizens by maintaining a separation of church and state. Many of the men who drafted the Constitution of the United States (1787), like those who approved its adoption, were, in varying degrees, Christians; others were Deists. These same men also lived in a society with significant Christian cultural components. Furthermore, a strong overlap existed between some of the state governments and Christianity. Yet, contrary to the suggestions of many people, the direction of constitutional change has not been away from a Christian founding and toward increasing secularism. Quite the contrary, the relationship between the federal government and religion has on the whole moved toward a greater degree of federal religiosity and away from the secularism of the Framers. Those who argue for a return to a "golden age" of Christian governance misunderstand the degree to which the Framers of the Constitution created a federal government intended not to further, promote, or foster religion but to coexist with the variety of state arrangements respecting religion. The Framers created a Constitution that reflected their religious cultural beliefs even as it marked out a clearly secular role for the federal government they proposed. There is no doubt that the preponderance of the men at the Constitutional Convention identified to some degree with a Christian denomination. Most of these men also participated in Christian prayer in their public and private lives, believed in the moral precepts of the Ten Commandments, and attended church services on, at least, an irregular basis. Many would later in their public lives swear an oath on the Bible and exalt the importance of religion and religious principles to the success of the American nation. They did not, however, constitutionalize their individual religious faiths or collective religious beliefs. The language of the Constitution, the Federalists' exegesis of the text during the ratification campaign, and early policies and practices helped establish a secular federal government in a Christian society. Stephen Botein aptly summarized the relationship of religion to the federal government: "Whatever else may be said," he observed, "about American political culture in that 64 HISTORY IN DISPUTE, VOLUME 12: THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

6 period (1787), it cannot be denied that the Constitution was a perfectly secular text if by that term, nothing more or less is signified than the absence of manifest religious content. That is, the Constitution contained no reference to God and none to religion except in the prohibition of a religious test for federal office." It is not that the Framers were unaware of religious constitutional language. The Articles of Confederation (1781), for example, close with a reference to "the Great Governor of the world." The Articles do not, however, provide for the exercise of power in any discernible way that would involve the government of the Confederation in a religious debate. Nor should too much be made of the reality of governance under the Articles. Granted, the Confederation Congress passed the Land Ordinance of 1785 and the Northwest Ordinance (1787), both of which included provisos for the promotion of religion, morality, and knowledge. It should be noted, though, that these ordinances anticipated the formation of some form of local government that would bear responsibility for carrying out these provisions. This allocation of responsibility was consistent with existing ideas of the separation of responsibility between the state and federal governments at the time of the framing and adoption of the Constitution. While the Framers of the Constitution invoked religious imagery to explain the formation of the Constitution, they also made clear that this new divinely inspired government was one of strictly enumerated powers. They did not explicitly state that the Constitution was purely secular; in that regard they were not prescient. They did not anticipate all of the questions that Americans would ask two hundred years later. James Wilson, a delegate to the Constitutional Convention and later a member of the U.S. Supreme Court, insisted that "the congressional authority is to be collected... from the positive part expressed" in the Constitution. "Hence, everything which is not given... is reserved." Wilson went on to explain that a bill of rights "would have been superfluous." Those rights and privileges associated with a traditional bill of rights, which would include religion, would not be reached positively or negatively by the powers of the new government. Wilson's statement is particularly important because of his central role in the drafting of the Constitution and its ratification in Pennsylvania. Other Federalists also made the same point. Alexander Hamilton in The Feder- HISTORY IN DISPUTE, VOLUME 12: THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 65

7 alist Papers and James Madison at the Virginia ratifying convention repeatedly insisted that the powers of the new government include "not one particle of religious authority." Finally, Federalists insisted throughout the ratification campaign that the absence of federal authority vis-a-vis religion promoted religious liberty, and implicitly, religion itself. Oliver Ellsworth, who served as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention and the Connecticut ratifying convention, discussed the prohibition of a religious test for officeholding in his public essays. He insisted that "the business of civil government is to protect the citizen in his rights, to defend the community from hostile powers, and to promote the general welfare. Civil government (in this instance the federal government) has no business to meddle with the private (including religious) opinions of the people." Ellsworth went on to extol state governmental action against "immoralities and impieties." However, at the nation's founding, that activity became principally a state responsibility. In seeking to understand the Framers' intentions in creating the Constitution, one should consider what they did and did not do in terms of official religiosity. The extent of religiosity exercised by the federal government as the new Constitution was implemented was quite modest. Members of Congress had available to them chaplains who served their respective parishes. Presidents George Washington and John Adams, additionally, issued proclamations calling for voluntary prayers of thanksgiving. It should also be noted that Congress in 1790 adopted an ordinance for the organization of the Southwest territories that included a proviso calling for the promotion of morality, education, and religion. Like its counterpart, the Northwest Ordinance (1787), it simply recognized the reality of early republic policy: matters of religion were the province of the state governments, whether they existed or were anticipated. Granted, the men who implemented the Constitution were Christians. However, they did not declare the United States a Christian nation, did not declare Sunday to be a day of rest and recognition of God, and did not include religious references in the architecture of the federal governmental buildings being built in Washington, D.C. Members of the first Congress did, however, anticipate Sunday delivery of the mails, a practice that continued at least into the 1820s. President Washington, while attending the local Episcopal church, chose not to take communion, in part because he believed it would be perceived as "an ostentatious display of religious zeal" on his part since he had not previously been a "communicant." A few years later President Adams signed a "Treaty of Peace and Friendship With Tripoli" (1796) that stipulated that the "government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion." It was this combination of both the omission of overt religiosity within the federal government and the interference with religion by official and unofficial governmental actions that sparked an early attack on the Constitution. In 1803 a Presbyterian minister from Philadelphia, Reverend Samuel O. Wylie, initiated a protracted debate by criticizing both the Pennsylvania state and federal constitutions for their failure to promote religion. He urged his coreligionists to withdraw all support from both governments until they modified their constitutions to be consistent with "his word." Wylie's pamphlet precipitated a protracted debate at the time. More important, it illustrates a point contemporary critics have lost sight of in their analysis of the relationship between the federal government and religion. The federal government initially stood aloof from matters of religion. It neither promoted nor hindered, in large measure, religious activity that was either a joint state and individual citizen's responsibility or an exclusively private one in those states that had disestablished religion. Subsequent developments throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have altered those relationships, at both the state and federal level. Americans may choose to alter them again in the twenty-first century, but current policy preferences do not change the reality of the eighteenth-century framing of a secular U.S. Constitution. -STEVEN R. BOYD, UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT SAN ANTONIO References David Barton, Original Intent: The Courts, the Constitution & Religion (Aledo, Tex.: Wall- Builder Press, 1996). Henry Steele Commager, ed., Documents of American History (New York: Crofts, 1934). Robert L. Cord, Separation of Church and State: Historical Fact and Current Fiction (New York: Lambeth Press, 1982). Max Farrand, The Framing of the Constitution of the United States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1913). 66 HISTORY IN DISPUTE, VOLUME 12: THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

8 William J. Federer, America's God and Country: Encyclopedia of Quotations (Coppell, Tex.: Fame, 1996). Winthrop S. Hudson, Religion in America: An Historical Account of the Development of American Religious Life, third edition (New York: Scribners, 1981). Edward Frank Humphrey, Nationalism and Religion in America, (Boston: Chipman Law Publishing, 1924). Leonard W. Levy, The Establishment Clause: Religion and the First Amendment (New York: Macmillan, 1986). William Lee Miller, The First Liberty: Religion and the American Republic (New York: Knopf, 1986). Samuel Eliot Morison, ed., Sources and Documents Illustrating the American Revolution, , and the Formation of the Federal Constitution, second edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1929). Richard John Neuhaus, The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1984). Philip S chaff, Church and State in the United States: Or, The American Idea of Religious Liberty and Its Practical Effects, With Official Documents (New York: Putnam, 1888). John Wilson, "Religion, Government, and Power in the New American Nation," in Religion and American Politics from the Colonial Period to the 1980s, edited by Mark A. Noll (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp HISTORY IN DISPUTE, VOLUME 12: THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 67